Our fine arts were developed; their types and uses were established, in times very different from the present, by men whose power of action upon things was insignificant in comparison with ours. But the amazing growth of our techniques, the adaptability and precision they have attained, the ideas and habits they are creating, make it a certainty that profound changes are impending in the ancient craft of the Beautiful. In all the arts there is a physical component which can no longer be considered or treated as it used to be, which cannot remain unaffected by our modern knowledge and power. For the last twenty years neither matter nor space nor time has been what it was from time immemorial. We must expect great innovations to transform the entire technique of the arts, thereby affecting artistic invention itself and perhaps even bringing about an amazing change in our very notion of art.
[PAUL VALERY, PIECES SUR L'ART, “Conquest of Ubiquity”]
The history of art is marked with incessant search for excellence in realistic paintings and sculptures. As artists learned about materials, perspective, anatomy, nature, math, geometry, art became not only a means to please but also “pure and faultless workmanship”. This meant that the virtuosos of each generation took more extensive liberties to embrace the latest established technological breakthroughs of their time to perfect their art. In this way, often, new standards were set for the new generations to come. All this resulted with art having new radical movements, set of revolutionary thoughts or so called “isms”: Classicism, Romanticism, Realism, Neo-Romanticism, Cubist-Realism, Futurism, Constructivism, Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism etc . Art cannot accommodate the emergence of new art “isms” due to the fact that it has used up the possibility of introducing new revolutionary developments in terms of structure. This however does not deny the individual creativity of the artist: one can combine the already existing notions of different “isms” and link them in a very intriguing way. But that is not enough to be qualified as an innovative visual idiom.
The visual idioms of traditional art are limited in introducing new ways of representing threedimensional material. Even the most skilfulartists are constrained in terms of depth and precision of delineating complicated differences of complex objects. With the help of computers, which are famous for their precision and speed of executing instructions, art can reach new heights by offering extraordinary precision in directing decisive structural factors, image manipulation, and algorithmic automatic generation of objects. It can also be further developed for different interaction scenarios in forms of software.
